Multi-city ticketing
 

I've been playing around with the AC website trying to price out various travel options for the fall, including multi-city itineraries.

What caught me off guard was, when selecting any destination that is essentially south of the US, a box appears asking for the fare type and when you search, the only thing listed are flight times with no price listing. I've also noticed that the pricing seems off as well, where there are P tickets available if booking one way, with the multi city I was being forced into C or above.

I honestly don't know if this is a glitch, or if it's Air Canada's way of trying to avoid multi-city ticketing in primarily tourist destinations. Hopefully it's just a glitch, as I have a 30% code that I'd like to use for this vacation.

Routes and dates?

3 things could be affecting this:

1. Not all fares are combinable with each other
2. AC manages availability based on the itinerary, not each segment. Therefore you may have availability on two flights in P on their own, but not on the same itinerary.
3. AC website has issues pricing complex multi-city itineraries.

All three of those sound plausible, and I'm hesitant to call it a glitch. It just seemed odd that for everywhere else, like YYZ-LAX // SFO-YYZ, or YYZ-FLR // DUB-YYZ, it was the same old booking page, without the fare drop down menu.


The specific itinerary I was looking at was YYZ-CUN and MCO-YYZ in late September early October.

I ran into the same problem of prices disappearing when searching for a Europe itinerary that had a multi-day stop in Toronto: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/air-c...er-canada.html

I have a feeling this guy has the answer.

Try booking an extreme example, YYZ-FRA // YUL-YYZ. You can't get Z to FRA and P back to YYZ, and you end up paying the one way fares, and it gets calculated at the end.

But do YYZ-FRA // CDG-YUL, you will have prices because you can combine these two TATL round trip fares.

But I can get a P fare to ICN and a Z fare back from NRT or HKG. All I know is that the system and approach is screwed up. Either designed as such or the work of the usual brilliant IT team.

Of course you can do that, but that's not what the OP is trying to do.

Colour me confused then. Please see Canadian Cow for a complimentary diet coke and rum as a token of my contrition. Tell him I sent you. :D

COKE ZERO!! Edit your post before he sees it!!! Are you trying to provoke a rant? ;)

How dare you!

There are a lot of things you can do if you call in (re: stop-overs, multi-city, etc) that you can't do online.

Imagine how much money AC would save in call centre dollars if we didn't have to though!

Oh man! I've spent probably an average of 75 minutes on the phone for mult-city ticketing that if I could have just punched in the flight numbers and carriers into the website and it spit out the itinerary that ITA matrix did I would have just booked it. Instead I have to take up a call centre Agents time for 75 min.

Or for 155 minutes if it's an Agent who doesn't want to transfer me to an Agent who has helped me before who is working because she wants to do it etc. I figure it was because of the gift card kick-back promo they were getting that month and it was like a $9k ticket.

Did you try PowerTools to force it through the website?

ya, it shows up on the ticket page, put my credit card in etc, and purchase and fails and gives me an error code and says to call...... hence my profile for my program lol.